Bridget Riley Quotes

As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.

Focusing isn't just an optical activity; it is also a mental one.

An artist's failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.

If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it's wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.

The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.

For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.

Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature...Observation is considered the key to natural science.

Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.

In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.

An artist's early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests, some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict

As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.

In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.

I used to build up to sensation, accumulating tension until it released a perceptual experience

I work with nature, although in completely new terms.

I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer

Painters have always needed a sort of veil upon which they can focus their attention. It's as though the more fully the consciousness is absorbed, the greater the freedom of the spirit behind